Thirteen ways of looking at The Truman show.
Spectacular special effects - not least Jim Carrey's unenhanced rubber face - have made Truman a phenomenal success. In the midst of the usual summer movie fluff, Hollywood has created a cutting work that exposes the irresponsible illusionism in our mass media and the public's avid gullibility in responding to it. As usual, the Hollywood pot delights in calling the TV kettle black. In this story, television producers legally adopt an orphan and broadcast every second of his life - without ever telling him. Of course the real plot hinges on the unwitting star escaping this phony world by drawing on his inner strengths. And, despite his quirky sense of humour, Truman retains an innate common sense in the midst of his artificial world - for one thing, he doesn't watch a lot of TV.
1. It's a fictional extension of cinema verite.
A TV corporation has erected an encased island town, the largest studio ever built. From there, for 30 years it has been telecasting globally, by satellite, every moment in the life of an unwitting hero, Truman Burbank, awake or asleep, beginning with his premature delivery. In broadcasting his more intimate moments, conventional decorum is observed, as manly mavens in his audience complain. The production crew orchestrates all the townsfolk around him as he makes his way through the community each day. Each Seahaven citizen is an extra, assigned a set pattern of daily behaviour. Only when Truman breaks out of his own routine does he notice any irregularity, like the TV crew's lunch table behind an elevator door and the same casual traffic looping through his neighbourhood. When Truman acts unpredictably, he forces actors to do what they were only pretending to do, like drive a bus or amputate the leg of a woman pretending to be anesthetized. When Truman expresses a specific anxiety, the town's newspaper or radio explicitly answers it in order to reassure him. The studio even telecasts old footage to depict what he's remembering. In the end, Truman steps out of a Magrittean seascape into the more grittily realistic world of - Hollywood! Following someone's life on film, of course, is what Canada's Allan King did when he moved in with Billy and Antoinette Edwards for A Married Couple (1969), a project that inspired an American network's TV-verite series exposing the lives of the Loud family.
2. It's a Jim Carrey film.
As the television hero/victim, "the rubber-faced comic" provides his most restrained, perhaps his first "serious," performance. Still, the film is based on his continuing persona. Carrey's past success has depended on his remarkable facial dexterity and manic energy, especially as augmented by the new special effects - as in The Mask (1994) or Batman Forever (1995). His Ace Ventura films (1994, 1995) draw on the puerile humour of a man who has never quite outgrown his adolescence. Aptly, in a 1983 episode of the TV series Buffalo Bill, Carrey played a Jerry Lewis impersonator. Lewis, of course, is Hollywood's most famous eternal infant. Even when Carrey played the standard issue, eponymous lawyer of Liar, Liar (1997) his character turned childlike when he became compulsively (and disastrously) truthful. In sum, the Carrey persona is a child-man with an eruptive, irrepressible energy. His Truman Burbank is a 30-year-old with a child's naivety but also with the child's will and persevering energy to escape. When he tells his pathologically cheery wife about his yearning to travel to Fiji, she scolds him: "You're talking like a teenager."
Paradoxically, Carrey's most successful film grows directly out of his major flop. In The Cable Guy (1996) Carrey played a demonic television service-man whose imagination and language were all formed by a life of solitary TV-watching. His Truman is that same metaphor taken a step further: a man who lives his entire life as a TV program. Where Carrey's cable-guy ruins the life of the man he connects to television, Truman's life is restricted on every side by the illusions of television. Plus ca change ...
3. It's written and co-produced by Andrew Nicoll.
He's the New Zealander who wrote and directed Gattaca (1997). In that underrated sci-fi flick, hero Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is one of the last natural babies born into a genetically controlled and sterile world. Because of a congenital heart problem, his DNA disqualifies him from his dream, space travel. In order to pass his physical, Victor borrows samples of a crippled athlete's hair, skin, blood, and urine. The Gattaca Corporation assigns him to a manned mission to Titan. But as launch date approaches, a murder investigation led by Victor's own brother closes in on him. Like Victor, Truman is a realistically flawed human being in an over-controlled synthetic future. But where the first Nicoll hero seeks transcendence by breaking into the artificial enclosed order, Truman's success lies in breaking out of it.
4. It's a Peter Weir film.
The Australian director seems fascinated with a primitive or mystical world that lies beyond the illusory superficies of civilization. Hence his The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), and Gallipoli (1981). In his more commercial "project" films his heroes try to make their way into a closed, alien society: The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Green Card (1990). In sensing that there is a more real order beyond his town's trivial rituals, Truman Burbank is a familiar Weir hero, however different the comic tones of his characterization.
5. It's a Frank Capra film.
The sentimental idealizer of Americana is long gone, but his patriotic spirit lives on. And on. Truman Burbank is the Capra-corny hero: the good-hearted little guy who revives the American values that the citizenry have briefly forgotten. We see an assortment of average fans - those who meet to watch the program at the Truman Bar, the man who watches while soaking in his tub, the two spinsters anxiously clutching their Truman Burbank pillow; when they all cheer their hero's escape from their favourite program, they evoke the citizens who rally behind Misters Smith and Deeds and reassert the values (and illusions) that make up mythic America. On the other hand ...
6. It's an anti-Capra film
- for a while. Truman lives in the kind of clean, generous society that Capra fantasized America to be at heart. But Weir's film shows that to be a calculated illusion. Truman's nearest and dearest (his parents, wife, lifelong friend) are all professional actors playing as roles what Truman mistakes to be his most genuine relationships. Except for the happy ending, this film depicts the American Dream society as a corrupt and manipulative deception. But don't blame Capra. That's showbiz. Ending a hard-edged satire with a playsafe, feelgood conclusion was a successful commercial strategy even before the Earl of Rochester's deathbed conversion (1680).
7. It's one of those "pod people" horror flicks.
Like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, either Don Siegel's chilling original (1956) or the Philip Kaufman remake (1978), the film exploits our dread that all those apparently friendly people around us are actually alien threats. They could be Martians, ghouls, zombies, vampires, Commies, flouridationists, free traders, anti-flouridationists, separatists, small-hell liberals - whatever the paranoia du jour. The horror is that we're surrounded by malevolents who pretend to be our friends, family, lovers. "They look just like regular people," Truman tells his pal, Marlon (Noah Emmerich), when he first twigs to the conspiracy.
Marlon has been virtually bred and raised to betray Truman. Whenever any problem arises, Marlon appears with his six-pack anodyne. In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Marlon allays Truman's suspicions by drawing on their lifelong trust: "The last thing I would ever do is lie to you ... Don't you see? If everyone is in on it, I'd have to be in on it too. And I'm not." Of course, he is. Even as he speaks his lines of sincerity, he is being prompted by the show's director, Christof (Ed Harris), from the studio's control room. The film taps our terror of betrayal by those closest to us. True to the America of Huck and Tom and Leslie Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft, Huck, Honey," the two men seem to be dancing with each other at the high-school party where Truman first dances with his wife-to-be, Meryl (Laura Linney). Marlon's betrayal is even more brutal than Meryl's. Of course, the names "Meryl" and "Marlon" are pure Hollywood (i.e., fiction). Alone amid all the falseness, Truman is our one True Man. His false "family" name comes from the studio site on the fringe of the Hollywood dream factory. You know, the Burbank where the wild times blow?
8. It's a bildungsroman.
Truman comes of age. To be a mature, responsible man, the childish 30-year-old must abandon the false security of a sweetly dominating set of matching wife and mother, his duplicitous best friend, a career as an insurance salesman with its trivial, manufactured anxieties, and a life of completely controlled safety. Truman's quest begins as a search for his "father." Even this familiar psychological need is reduced to a fictional scheme. Years before, the studio scripted this parent's death at sea, as part of a strategy to frighten Truman into staying on the island. But when the washed-up player "infiltrates" the set, years after Truman watched him drown, the producers must deal with the worst of the occasional crises that threaten to give the game away. They solve this particular dilemma by writing the disgruntled actor back into the plot - Dad's just been suffering from amnesia for nearly twenty years. During the emotional reunion, director Weir emphasizes the mechanics of staging and telecasting as the various hidden cameras zoom in to capture the moment. The manipulative technicians are as moved as their gulled star and his audience of millions - but by their own cold stratagems. When Truman later breaks through the fake sky and escapes, he strides into a dark world of risks, hard choices, and pain. But in a life of natural ambivalence he will be master of his own fate and futility.
9. Hey, that sounds like your basic Eden archetype.
Truman tosses away his perfect, protected life when he tastes the knowledge of good and evil. That's real (i.e., postlapsarian) life for you. Truman's longlost father is named Kirk (i.e., Church). The program's architect - played by conscientious All-American Ed Harris (John Glenn in The Right Stuff) - is named simply Christof. Rather than set up a Christ-like martyrdom, however, this story presents a "televisionary" whose hubris is outrageously overreaching, both in trying to sustain a completely controlled world and in presuming to dominate even one individual's life.
In a TV interview Christof is introduced as someone who carefully guards his own privacy. He then announces that the apparently sterile Meryl will soon leave Truman and that a new love is being written into his life so that the show will feature the first live televised conception. Near the end of the film, Christof's massive ego is in the spotlight again as he seeks to prevent Truman's escape by sea, unleashing a fierce storm that seems certain to drown his cherished star (so much for the safety of his sea haven). As Truman was born on live TV, Christof thinks he can kill him there. Christof is a mortal who pretends to godlike power. Either he has been seduced by his own surname, or in his overweening ambition he has recreated himself as a bad eminence. When Christof speaks from the sky to the escaping Truman, he identifies himself as "the creator [significant pause] of a television show that gives hope and joy to millions." Though this would-be god claims there is more truth and security in the world he created for Truman than in the real one outside, Truman flees the illusion of Eden. In a more pagan context, the film recalls The Gods Must be Crazy (1980). Instead of a Coke bottle falling mysteriously from the sky, alerting the simple savage to a reality beyond, here a stage-light falls from Truman's too-blue heaven.
10. Truman is our Loman.
In Death of a Salesman (1949) Arthur Miller projected the contemporary tragic hero as a low-born, common man, striving to retain his dignity in a callous, commercialized world. As the Loman of the '90s, Truman is an even more tragically wasted figure. This insurance salesman is actually the merchandise. His character and life are reduced to the product sold by the TV corporation that legally adopted him. The ubiquitous product placement makes his life a nonstop commercial. His wife pours him a commercial with every cup, and Marlon holds his beer up for the camera. Two twin brothers stop Truman on his way to work every morning, then pose him against an ever-changing sidewalk ad, whether for Kentucky (the "fried" is modishly silent) Chicken or Colonial Homes. During these exchanges Truman thinks he's selling them a policy, but they are using him to draw attention to the show's sponsors.
Until he escapes, he knows no life other than the artifice in which he's cast. Truman is a commodity. In one of the Hollywood dramas he emotes before his bathroom mirror, he instructs his starving comrades: "Eat me, dammit! That's an order!" The film ends not on Truman's escape but on two security guards who have long been riveted by his saga. Once Truman is gone, stepping out of the TV frame for good, they immediately forget him and move down the menu. One asks for another pizza slice: "What else is on? Where's the TV Guide?"
In one respect the film provides the egotist's dream: Truman seems the centre of the town's - in fact the world's - attention. But that importance is an illusion. The whole town conspires to restrict him to the role the network wants him to play. It's not a matter of faking, the actor playing Marlon claims, but of control. That is Christof's last argument as he tries to persuade Truman not to leave: the real world holds as much dishonesty and treachery as Seahaven Island, but without the safety provided by Christof's endless script. In the opening frames, Christof has explained the motivation behind the show, the viewers' need to focus on a "real" person instead of the special effects and counterfeit emotions of regular TV drama. This claim is false. Truman's whole world, Seahaven Island, is all one colossal special effect. Except for him, all the townsfolk counterfeit their emotions.
11. It's a love story.
How could it not be? If even the grandeur of Titanic, with its state-of-the-art disaster effects, was deemed in need of a vapid Romeo-and-Juliet implant, why not here? Truman's maturing is defined by his passage from a scripted marriage to an actress to his genuine ardour for the extra who escapes her script, Sylvia (Natascha McElhone). Sylvia, Sylvia, what is she? She's what he hasn't met before, a genuine person. She's the forbidden fruit he tastes at the beach, the goddess whose image he tries to recreate by pasting together noses, eyes, and mouths torn out of the glamour mags, the dedicated activist who - Mary and Martha in one - both campaigns and prays for his redemption.
Sylvia leads the "Free Truman" movement in the outside world. While Christof calls himself the "creator" of Truman's world, she prays to the macro-creator, God, for Truman's escape. She's the woman who refuses both to stay scripted (as Lauren) or to be bought off (as was the actor who played Truman's father). A flashback recounts Truman's first encounter with his wife-to-be, when she "accidentally" throws herself into his lap just as he is being smitten with his first glimpse of Sylvia/Lauren (after all, Meryl is the designated love interest, and can't let herself be upstaged by a mere bit player). But later, the rebellious extra manages to steal a few moments alone with Truman in order to warn him about his artificial world. Her "father" suddenly appears and stuffs her into his car, claiming that she suffers from delusions and that her family is moving away to Fiji.
Although the show's producers do their best to keep Truman focused on the woman slated to be his wife/co-star, he is always haunted by the memory of the strange, passionate woman with whom he shared only a few minutes of privacy. Hidden on the back of a photo of his wife, he keeps his collage of facial parts, a reconstruction of his true love. In an ingenious paradox, this reversal of images shows the antithetical nature of the two women. Meryl is false, Sylvia genuine; Meryl's image is whole but posed, while Sylvia's is made up of pieces of other pictures, but represents the real woman Truman preserves in his mind.
Phoning a call-in show, Sylvia accuses Christof of making Truman a prisoner. Christof responds that he is giving Truman a safer and fuller life than he would have had in her "real" world. But her honesty and spirit give the lie to the creator's spiel; she is evidence that the real world has more to offer Truman than the artificial one. When Truman finally steps through the wall of his false life, she watches, with the rest of the planet, and then rushes out of her apartment to go to him. He will find his true love not in the mythic Fiji Islands, but practically next door in Hollywood.
12. This plastic sitcom world is a mirror of our reality.
It primarily depicts the degree to which our reality is mediated by the media. As Christof explains, "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented." That's true equally of Truman, his audience, and by extension their audience (us). The one "real" TV show Truman watches is I Love Lucy. That's apt, because North America was similarly transfixed when Lucy/Lucille Ball carried and gave birth to her Little Ricky (Ricardo). The stories are legion of people who actually assume that real lives are being depicted on The Millionaire, Coronation Street, the Reagan presidency, and Dan Quayle's promotion of/into Murphy Brown. In their radical post-modernism, Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show used the fact that the lines between reality and media-ated fiction have grown increasingly blurry, to the point that what we live and what we read seem equally matters of meta-fiction. As the next Will Rogers might say, "I never meta-fiction I didn't live" - or experienced something in life that wasn't inflected by some fiction or another. The Truman Show's characters' lives seem drawn from Hollywood. The neighbour's Dalmatian is named Pluto. Truman's women evoke Meryl Streep: his wife is named after her and his true love, Sylvia, looks like her. If Renaissance drama was obsessed with the disparity between appearance and reality, our age has surrendered to the confusion between being and performing.
The audience we see reacting to The Truman Show on TV reflects the audience watching The Truman Show in the cinema. Except for a few backstage scenes, most of the film is presented as simply what the TV viewers are seeing. What's introduced to us as the feature film is really the program within the film, the network TV show. The opening credits are for the fictional show, not the film ("Starring Truman Burbank as himself"). We don't get the film's credits until - with Truman - we've escaped the network. Hence the brilliant casting of unfamiliar actors. With the exception of Carrey and Harris, nobody is recognizable. As a result we, like our hero, can't distinguish between an actor and a real person in Truman's life. In fact, Weir originally intended to have a video-camera trained on his audience wherever the film played, so that our audience reaction would be made part of the film. Like Truman, we would have been subsumed into his cast of extras. Even without that device, though, the film functions as a critique of our preference for passivity and delusions of security, in life as in cinema, when we holus-bolus buy into the myths and delimitations of our times.
13. The buck stops here.
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